It’s been a monumentally busy year – the kind that drains your battery until your whole system slips into Land Rover limp mode. Yes, that’s an actual feature: the car politely informs you, “You’ve really stuffed it now,” and then refuses to go faster than 40km/h while sounding expensive. If humans had limp mode, we’d save billions in burnout, medical aid, and “Sorry for the delay, I’m feeling overwhelmed” emails.
But somehow, between the exhaustion, the deadlines, and the emotional equivalent of trying to restart Windows 95 with a fork while the machine beeps in a tone that strongly implies you personally have disappointed it, there’s been something else too: gratitude. Growth. A slow accumulation of clarity. And circling inside that clarity – like a cat trying to decide whether to sit on your keyboard or your soul – was a single realisation:
Personal Values aren’t soft. They’re not scented candles for your personality. They’re structural – the psychological scaffolding keeping your entire internal operating system from collapsing like a toddler-built Jenga tower.
Not the poster values companies laminate and forget. I mean the real ones, the personal value system that quietly determines how you make decisions, what drains you, what energises you, who you trust, what you tolerate, and why some parts of your life feel aligned while others feel like an emotional tax you never agreed to.
This year forced me to finally see something I’d been unconsciously avoiding:
I had never actually defined my personal values consciously.
And the cost of that was hiding in plain sight.
The Values You Inherited… And the Ones Running the Show
When I slowed down long enough to reflect, I realised something embarrassingly simple: most of my personal values were never chosen. They were absorbed. Installed. Downloaded onto me like suspicious childhood software updates labelled “This Just Is,” usually installed by adults who had no business operating heavy emotional machinery. These inherited values came from everywhere – family, school, sport, culture, religion, marketing, early managers, old habits, and the occasional wise butcher who provided both biltong and unsolicited moral philosophy.
This is what psychologists call unconscious values – beliefs so familiar we mistake them for truth.
Adam Grant explains this beautifully in Think Again: the longer you hold a belief, the more true it feels. Not because it is true, but because the brain loves familiarity more than accuracy. It’s the same cognitive blind spot that fuels epic arguments about Pluto.
And when these inherited values are challenged, we default to one of three internal roles – all starring you, all overacting.
- The Preacher delivers impassioned sermons defending sacred beliefs from 2004, armed with the confidence of a man who has just discovered fire.
- The Prosecutor cross-examines everyone else’s logic to avoid reconsidering your own; an internal lawyer billing by the objection.
- The Politician shapeshifts into whatever value set gets the most applause, campaigning for approval like it’s election season inside your psyche.
And the worst part? These three don’t even wait to be invited. They barge in, reorganise your mental furniture, and then insist you thank them for the chaos.
Three costumes, one purpose:
protect the familiar – even when the familiar no longer works.
This hit me sharply when I was asked earlier this year to define my actual personal values – not the ones I admired, but the ones I lived by. I froze instantly, because I suddenly realised how many of my beliefs, priorities and choices were being driven by inherited values rather than chosen ones.
The work ahead wasn’t about discovering new personal values.
It was about unlearning the old ones.
Unlearning: The Hardest (and Most Liberating) Work of All
Unlearning is not glamorous work. Learning feels exciting, like downloading a shiny new app that promises to organise your life. Unlearning feels like trying to uninstall ancient software that keeps shouting “Error: File still in use,” even though the last time you opened it Jacob Zuma still had a functioning Twitter account. Old values don’t politely excuse themselves when they’ve outlived their usefulness; they behave like the ring a hot mug leaves on a wooden table – the kind of stain that survives multiple scrubbings, three life stages, and at least one house move.
What makes this especially infuriating is Adam Grant’s point that the smarter you are, the harder it becomes to update belief systems. Intelligent people recognise patterns so quickly that they accidentally weaponise that intelligence in defence of outdated beliefs. The brain becomes a courtroom where your old logic hires the sharpest possible lawyer, whose sole job is to prevent you from reconsidering anything. It’s not a flaw; it’s simply one of human psychology’s more inconvenient design features.
But things began shifting when I stopped treating values as philosophical ideas and began seeing them as energy mechanics – the blueprint for where effort becomes momentum, and where it quietly drains away. Once I understood that, misaligned values lit up instantly, revealing themselves in all the places I’d previously written off as “just being busy” or “just being tired.” I started noticing:
- obligations I had never consciously chosen
- expectations I carried forward out of pure autopilot
- inherited values running silently in the background
- friction points that drained emotional energy
- behaviours optimised for a past version of myself
It was confronting, but clarifying – the kind of clarity that’s impossible to unsee. I’d spent years believing progress required adding more: more effort, more discipline, more structure. But the truth was the opposite. Progress came from subtraction – from removing the friction points, the outdated belief patterns, the inherited personal values that quietly siphoned energy away from everything that mattered.
And the moment I began letting go, the entire internal architecture shifted. My mind softened. The static dropped. My decisions became cleaner. Tasks felt lighter, not because life had changed, but because my values had finally stopped sabotaging my energy. Alignment isn’t philosophical. It’s mechanical. It’s the moment drag turns into acceleration, and you finally understand why everything felt heavier than it should.
From Self-Defending to Self-Authoring: Where Reinvention Begins
Somewhere inside this process, without any dramatic fireworks, I began shifting from what psychologists describe as the self-defending mind into the self-authoring mind. It’s not as mystical as it sounds. The self-defending mind clings to inherited beliefs and outdated identity with the desperation of a toddler gripping a disgusting blanket that “can’t be washed because it has emotions,” and which by now is less blanket and more biohazard with nostalgia. It protects what’s familiar because familiarity feels safe, even when it quietly drains more energy than it returns.
The self-authoring mind, however, is where the real evolution begins. Instead of guarding your internal operating system, it starts updating it. It asks more honest questions: Which of my values are truly mine? Which were inherited? Which ones fit who I am now, and which belong to someone I no longer am? It stops optimising your life around expired versions of yourself and starts shaping it around the identity you’re consciously building.
You know you’re shifting into self-authoring mode when something inside you finally clicks – not dramatically, not with angelic choirs, but with the quiet confidence of a toaster that has finally figured out how toasted you like your bread. Effort starts turning into momentum. You stop bracing through your own life and start steering it. Your emotional engine stops misfiring. Your energy stops leaking through cracks created by values you never consciously chose. It feels like discovering a hidden setting in your psyche labelled “Life, but less unnecessarily difficult.”
And this, not the overhyped productivity hacks or the 48-step morning routines, is where reinvention actually begins. Reinvention doesn’t start with adding more. It starts with removing what contradicts your design. Once your personal values shift into alignment, everything recalibrates: your boundaries strengthen, your decisions sharpen, your relationships change shape, your focus returns, and your energy flows into places where it can finally compound.
You feel it immediately. The drag reduces. The acceleration returns. And suddenly, after years of forcing things uphill, you begin moving forward by fit rather than force. It’s subtle but unmistakable – the moment your internal architecture finally lines up with the life you’re trying to build.
So the real question becomes this:
Which personal values are you still defending out of familiarity, and which ones are you finally ready to define for yourself?
And if you let go of even one… what might shift almost immediately? Because sometimes the tiniest value update is enough to turn your whole life from buffering wheel to broadband.
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